Runes: Scaling vs. Flat

Runes: Scaling vs. Flat

One of the things I admire about this game is the masteries and rune systems. They give the ability to add subtle (and in cases, not so subtle) changes to each hero so that no 2 are perfect equals. Nevertheless, I hated the fact that many just stack one type of runes (Crit Damage is a game changer for Master Yi and the Pirate). Alas, its human nature to maximize gain of any resource.

I was always debating wether to choose scaling runes or flat value runes. Anyone would assume that scaling runes will be better towards late game. I am sad to report that they are not (specially crit damage and armor peneteration). Some scaling runes are far superior than the flat runes and vice versa.

I think Riot needs to take another look at those because it made no sence to me at all. In many cases where the balance is not there at all.

I have put together a small table to compare tier 3 runes and attached it here.. enjoy..

crit damage and armor penetration scaling runes and the others were removed from the grab bag and nerfed into oblivion, and are intended to be removed from the game completely, but people who had them before the change still have them in their useless state

Don't understimate the flat boost runes. Let's say I stack 9 flat boost health runes and mana runes instead of scaling ones. I'll be at a really minor disadvantage late in the game, but in the first 10 minutes, I'll have a huge advantage over players who didn't take flat gain runes. *Some* of the flat runes, like you've said, are terrible, like .09 physical damage or whatever, and that's unfortunate, but if you filled a page up with those crappy physical damage runes you'd still have an advantage at the start.

Thank you for making this table as this is a problem that has bothered me for a while. I would bet that riot has already know these issues though and is reworking some of the runes to make more sense at the moment though.

I have yet to see any Dodge runes past the flatrates of 0.75% Seals and the 1.5% Quintessence, the others even exist?

I collected the information from the website. As indicate by some posters, some runes may have been removed frm the grab bag and you may not see them in-game.

The main observation I had is that some runes are always better as scaling (as they become stronger than flat runes as early as level 4). Examples are: Mana regen, Health regen and Attack Damage.

Other runes are always better as flat (either because they are always stronger than scaling rune or that scaling runes become better after level 14) examples of those are: crit damage, armor peneteration and magic peneteration.

The rest lay in the 6-10 levels for scaling to be better than flat and those are dependent on how much value does the player put into their rune build and when they want the difference to be apparent.